


Human Dreams

by bearonthecouch



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Fatherhood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-16 22:19:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16503809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearonthecouch/pseuds/bearonthecouch
Summary: “He hates me,” Hohenheim says. A simple truth that should not hurt this much. Why should he have expected anything different?





	Human Dreams

Hohenheim hasn’t seen a child born since he himself was little more than a child, almost half a millennium ago. He’s surprised to realize that nothing much has changed about the process.

When Trisha reaches out to brush her fingers against his bare arm, pulling him toward the newborn cradled against her body, Hohenheim protests. He doesn’t want to touch the baby. Doesn’t want to corrupt him. He doesn’t deserve to have him in the first place.

He’s so beautiful.

“Hohenheim, please. He’s your son.”

Trisha’s exhausted, and Hohenheim knows she needs to sleep. He sits down at the foot of the bed and nervously takes brand new Edward Elric from her arms. Trisha’s name, not his, which was another argument, months ago, when their son was still being nurtured in her womb. Because the boy comes from Trisha’s body, because Hohenheim can’t afford a traceable connection of any kind to the family he has sworn to protect from dangers they will hopefully never need to know about. And because family lines were matrilineal in Xerxes, at least among the lower classes and the slaves, where paternal ties were weak if they existed at all.

Hohenheim looks down at the tiny little boy who stirs restlessly in his arms, with his face turning red and his mouth opening to wail his obvious discomfort with his father holding him. Or maybe with the world in general. Smart kid.

But Trisha needs to sleep, so before he’s even thought about what he’s doing, Hohenheim has shifted Edward to rest against his shoulder, and he’s humming and then whisper-singing a Xerxian lullaby. He doesn’t have a great singing voice, but that isn’t the point. Edward stops crying immediately.

“You like that, do you?” Hohenheim asks, still not switching out of the ancient language that Edward has no hope of understanding. Honestly, Hohenheim’s not sure if a just-born infant is capable of understanding his own native language. Trisha says he can. Hohenheim sticks to Xerxian. He rubs the baby’s back in slow circles until he falls asleep. Hohenheim sighs, and closes his eyes as he lays out the truth for his son. “I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”

Ed breathes against his shoulder. He’s so _small_. Human beings are so fragile, and this one most of all. There’s been a churning fear in his gut since Trisha first announced her pregnancy. Honestly, Hohenheim hadn’t even realized he could have children. True, he’s spent most of his impossibly long lifespan avoiding people, but four hundred years is a long time, and it seems mathematically improbable that he did not ever sire a child in all that time, traveling most of the known world. But it also seems improbable that four hundred years after giving up on the idea of ever being treated like a human being who is allowed to strive for human dreams, he would meet a young woman with a shy smile in a sheep farming town and slowly come to realize that he loves her.

Hohenheim looks from the baby to Trisha and back again. He’s spent a lot of time awake and alone in crowded rooms, all the years that he’s been wandering. This is the first time it’s ever had him feeling quite so torn, caught between the nameless boy he still remembers being and the ancient observer who’s seen empires fall and rise. Edward’s tiny body pressed against his chest is warm and solid and real. He tries to anchor himself in the tangible reality of his newborn son as he stands up and begins pacing first the bedroom, and then the rest of the house. Through the windows, he can see the trees assaulted by rough winds and heavy rain. He can almost hear the water pounding against the ground outside.

Edward starts to whimper as Hohenheim stands in front of the kitchen window staring out at the storm. “Shhh,” Hohenheim soothes. “Quiet down. It’ll be alright.” And he doesn’t know who he’s talking to. Because Hohenheim has learned to ignore, if not silence, the voices in his head. Many of them have silenced themselves over hundreds of years, their individuality lost in the sea of crying souls. Others have been snuffed out of existence entirely in those times where Hohenheim has no recourse except using the power of the Philosopher’s Stone inside him. But many of them are very, very loud today: the mothers and fathers who lost their children and blame him for the destruction of Xerxes. Some of them have older grudges, from when they were alive. And then there are the children themselves, screaming and wailing with raw desperation, and so, so afraid. Hohenheim damn well knows he can’t save everyone; he really doesn’t even have the right to try. He doesn’t try to placate the restless souls, just listens to their screaming. They’re trapped in their container. They can’t hurt Ed.

Far from being calmed by Hohenheim’s gentle pleading, Ed just wails louder, screaming right into his ear. Hohenheim tries, but no combination of Amestrian and Xerxian quiets his son. His growing panic only seems to make it worse, as if the boy can somehow sense it. After several minutes of this, he creeps carefully toward the bedroom where he’d left Trisha. She grins at him as he walks in, sheepish and worried. Edward is still crying so hard it shakes his entire tiny body.

Hohenheim sits down on the bed at Trisha’s silent urging. She lifts Ed carefully from Hohenheim’s arms, whispering nonsense sounds and then putting the baby at her breast to nurse. The room is finally quiet. The echoes of Ed’s crying fight with the voices of the souls trapped within Hohenheim. Even in a quiet room, he rarely finds true peace.

“He hates me,” Hohenheim says. A simple truth that should not hurt this much. Why should he have expected anything different?

Trisha shakes her head, smiling at him, radiant. And still exhausted. It should have been a simple thing to let her sleep. Hohenheim can’t even get that right.

“He does not hate you,” Trisha says softly. She shifts the baby a little bit so that she can move closer to Hohenheim. She rests her hand on his shoulder, soft and soothing. But Hohenheim pulls away. He has never liked casual touch. Not even from her.

Trisha respects his need for space, but she keeps her eyes on him, her entire being focused on him, even with their newborn son pressed up against her body. “Hohenheim?”

He shakes his head. Trisha knows a few things, like the fact that he doesn’t age or change, yet he is very old: over a dozen human generations old. But she does not know everything. Arguably, she doesn’t know the most important things. He has never mentioned Xerxes and has no idea if she’s heard the legends, in her simple life in a tiny town that was only connected to wider Amestris by a train station a handful of years before she was born. The kinds of academics and theorists that talk about Xerxes don’t come to places like Resembool. So it was easier not to tell her. What could he say, anyway? Was he supposed to just blurt out the fact that he holds over 500,000 angry ghosts inside his body? How was he ever supposed to explain the utter powerlessness of his first life, and the false promises whispered by a voice without a body, born from his blood? What could he say that wouldn’t make her hate him; how could he justify the instant death of an entire nation, all his fault?

“Hohenheim, what are you thinking?"

He shakes his head again, and then closes his eyes, and breathes out. “I suppose I'm just overwhelmed,” he says, without meeting Trisha’s eyes. He looks down at the baby instead, little Edward, whose eyes are open as he drinks greedily from Trisha’s body, with tiny hands clenched into tiny fists. Hohenheim watches as the baby pulls away from his mother’s nipple and relaxes. He looks sleepy, yet it also looks like he’s fighting to keep his eyes open. He doesn’t want to miss a thing.

And Hohenheim smiles at Ed, trying to create some sort of connection. He’s shocked to realize that he can already imagine flashes of his son’s future: running and playing and laughing with other children, or reading a book with a look of studious concentration on his face, drinking in knowledge without fear of the consequences. Hohenheim sees Edward growing up, from toddler to little boy to teenager, sitting with his parents at the small table in the kitchen that wraps them in warmth and love and laughter. In Hohenheim’s fantasies, Edward even looks like him. He looks Xerxian, with golden eyes and pale skin that would darken if he lived under the desert sun.

All of these dreams are ancient, tracing back to the moment when Hohenheim crossed the one-way line that replaced a number with a name and offered him choice, and freedom, and power he had never had before. The shadowy form that both created him and was created by him, needled him with questions that were intoxicating and dangerous. The dwarf in the flask could get into his head, laughing and taunting and desperately seeking some path to becoming human. “What makes you happy, Hohenheim? _What do you want?_ ”

He looks down at Ed again, and the baby has once again closed his eyes, and seems to be resting comfortably in Trisha’s arms. Hohenheim looks up at her and smiles with tears in his eyes. Trisha frowns at him, worried even though Edward needs her attention and her love far more than he does. She doesn’t say anything, just places Edward in the little bassinet beside the bed. And then she turns back to Hohenheim and scoots up close to his body, and he wraps his arm around her and kisses her, because it feels natural and right and true. Trisha pulls away first, and settles in for a long conversation.

“I’m alright,” Hohenheim murmurs, in response to the obvious unspoken question. “I’m just… I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Longer than you know.”

Trisha’s still frowning, confusion and worry written on her face, and in the way she holds herself.

Hohenheim sighs and stares down at the bedspread for several long seconds, before he picks up his head and takes a breath, and starts talking about ancient history. He doesn’t tell her everything, but he tells her more than he has ever told anyone, since the day his world ended but _the world_ kept turning and changing and remaking itself into something new. He tells her enough for her to understand that this moment, this miracle, is not the end of the story; it’s the beginning.

Ed sleeps in the bassinet, and Hohenheim can’t stop looking at him, wondering what he’s dreaming.


End file.
